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FIRST Lady Laura Bush will kick off the year-long runup to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial today at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in Hodgenville, Ky.

Not that Lincoln is ever far from our minds. An old publishing joke has it that the surefire bestseller is a book on Lincoln’s doctor’s dog – combining Lincoln-mania with its only rivals, health and pets.

Unfortunately, some common notions about Lincoln are as irrelevant, or worse, than a book on his doctor’s dog. Misconceptions about Lincoln have haunted the 2008 election cycle.

Barack Obama‘s supporters proudly note that both men were only small-time Illinois politicians before they ran for the White House. In fact, Obama’s record is more impressive than Lincoln’s, at least on paper: Obama spent 12 years in the Illinois Legislature, Lincoln only four; Obama has served four years in the US Senate, Lincoln did two years in the House.

And the point Obama fans want to make – that resumes aren’t everything – has some truth to it. Surely the most experienced man ever to become president was James Buchanan – Lincoln’s hapless predecessor in the White House.

But the Obama crew conveniently forgets that Lincoln’s pre-presidential record was marked by strong stands on controversial issues. Lincoln ran for the Senate himself in 1858 – and, unlike Obama, he lost. But he lost to Stephen Douglas, one of the nation’s most prominent Democrats, and their debates on human rights and self-government are still studied. Obama won his Senate seat by rolling over the frantic lightweight Alan Keyes.

Lincoln’s great arguments – “Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them” – were hammered out in political battle. Obama is VH1 for the soul.

On the Republican side, libertarian gadfly Ron Paul declared on “Meet the Press” late last year that Lincoln fought a “senseless” Civil War, “just to . . . get rid of the original intent of the Republic.” This neo-Confederate campfire story is found in several conservative revisionist books on American history; it depicts Lincoln as a statist and a revolutionary, going to war to gratify his own will to power.

Lincoln was no stovepipe Nietzsche. He did say, in his first Inaugural Address, that slavery “was wrong, and ought not to be extended.” Those sentiments, which he had often expressed before, were enough to cause seven southern states to leave the Union after his election (four more joined them after he was inaugurated). But he had also promised not to touch slavery where it existed, and to uphold fugitive-slave laws, as mandated by the Constitution (Article IV, Section 2).

Lincoln was a conservative, with a legalistic turn of mind: He clung to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence like a rock-climber. When the Union itself was under attack, he went all out.

Lincoln’s caution, meanwhile, earns him the sneers of multiculturalist lefties. He was, they point out, a man of his time. He believed that blacks and whites were unequal “in some respects,” and early in his career, he favored sending freed former slaves to Liberia (arguably a worse fate, considering Liberia’s recent past, than Jim Crow and racism here).

But he always believed that human bondage was hateful and un-American – and as the Civil War unfolded, he came to hope that the United States might experience “a new birth of freedom” for all.

Maybe the most prevalent misconception we have of Lincoln is that he is ours alone. But Lincoln was always mindful of his, and America’s, role in the world.

As Michael Knox Beran argues in “Forge of Empires,” the most insightful and surprising recent book on Lincoln, the 1860s was a decade of upheaval throughout the West. Russia liberated 22 million serfs; Prussia united Germany, sweeping away feudal institutions and borders.

Lincoln knew that there was a global struggle afoot between freedom and coercion: “I hate . . . the spread of slavery,” he said in 1854, “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.”

A year later, he wrote that if the new Know-Nothing Party, hostile to foreigners and Catholics, should rise to power alongside slaveholders, “I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure.”

Russia freed its serfs without freeing its political institutions; Germany replaced petty tyrants with a militarized imperial state. Czar and Kaiser were forerunners of Stalin and Hitler, the great monsters of the 20th century. Lincoln’s fight to the death with slavery ensured that America would enter the modern world as a champion of freedom.

Think of that when you see a penny on the sidewalk or hear some politicians scuffling over Lincoln’s legacy.